I'm trying to make a sequencing activity in Google Classroom. When you did your Narrative Writing Breakout, how did you make the sentence strips where we could move them around and put them in order?

My newest obsession: BreakoutEDU. If you're not familiar with this concept in learning, you definitely should get there! (Check it out at breakoutedu.com)

One of the projects I recently did with several teachers was to help them get both personal narrative and friendly letter writing samples from their students. In order to help them start generating their writing and to review the concepts they had already learned, I created a Breakout in which students could review sequencing, transition words and phrases, parts of a text (depending on the genre), and then actually create a rough draft.

The first activity revolved around piecing together a "puzzle" where students would need to rely on transitional words, context clues, and background knowledge to piece back together a narrative text. To create this activity, I made a Google Drawing where I simply created text boxes, then used the options in the "Arrange" menu to stack them all together.

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I recreated this activity for a Christmas-themed breakout, where students had to put together and identify the parts of a friendly letter:

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In this second iteration, I wrote the letter using a text box in Drawings, added the holiday letterhead, and downloaded the file as an image. After deleting the entire canvas and uploading the newly-saved image, I duplicated and cropped the letter, once for each "piece" of the puzzle. Finally, I rotated the pieces at odd angles, and grouped them in the center of the canvas, centering them both vertically and horizontally.

This proved to be a fun challenge for students. Not only were they reviewing the components of writing and reading critcally for clues, but they were also practicing (and in some cases just learning) how to use the tools in Google Drawing. Instead of teaching GOOGLE tools, we were truly integrating technology into the curriculum!